MegaBlog

As a member of the Frankenstien team I am excused from blogging this week.

I will first comment on the Dianes Reemes (sic?) show podcast. How the heck did this lady get a radio show? Maybe she was sick? Her voice was painful to listen to. I found my mind was wandering while listening to this, so I started playing solitaire and found that helped. I’m a notorious multi-tasker. We learned in my human exceptionalities class that some people need to do something with their hands in order to focus while listening – I guess it must be true. Other thoughts on the show, Doug Mescar was your average bureaucrat; passing the blame for negative results of NCLB to states, who pass the blame to the administrators, who in turn will blame the teachers. Also, it appeared the host wasn’t a huge fan of Kozol; she interrupted him nearly every time he spoke.

What was the deal with the musical interludes? Couldn’t they have cut those out for the podcast?

My assigned section of Teacher Man was pretty depressing. Don’t get me wrong, McCourt is always entertaining (I’ve read his other books). But this section dealt with his self-doubt when it came to being an effective teacher and indecision about whether to continue or what to do with his life. I have a lot of doubt about how good of a teacher I will be and I don’t really know if college is preparing me for the reality of the job. I guess that’s what student teaching is for.

My article this week was about free speech. Does this right apply to a student newspaper? Should high schools and colleges be able to decide what is and is not written in the school newspaper? Why is it such a big deal to make fun of the president? These are all questions I could discuss with students. You can find the article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/business/media/01taser.html?ref=education .

So the reading this week was on the inclusion of multiple texts in the classroom and also on ways to make your classroom feel like a supportive community of learners. First of all, Chapter 4 was awesome! That list of books in the back was so helpful, I am now commited to actually not selling this book back at the end of the semester. Z & D finally got to me. I agree that it is pointless to attempt to make student’s try and read something that is totally over their heads, i.e. having a seventh grader try to read Mien Kampf while studying WWII. Perhaps a novel about someone their age in Europe during the war would be much better. I also liked the idea of building up a classroom library of all sorts of materials and assigning students to act as librarians. I would just hate it if my books got stolen though!

My article this week was a review of the Ken Burns film The War. It discusses how Burns tells the story of WWII through the eyes of the soldiers, yet leaves out much of the reasoning behind the war. While I agree knowing the reasoning behind the conflict is very important, Burns has achieved just what we all want to do in our classroom, he makes the content personal. Watching this film actually makes you think about what you might have done if faced with the same decisions and hardships as these men and women. I have been watching this film for two weeks now and I can’t wait to use it in my classroom someday. The article can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/01/arts/01conn.html?pagewanted=1&ref=television 

Well, the readings this week were a bit ironic for me. Chapter three was all about how textbooks shouldn’t be the sole basis for information in the classroom, as they are often poorly written, so no offense Daniels and Zemelman but I thought the chapter was somewhat poorly written! It was organized well and the book didn’t cost too much so I guess they made their point. I thought the strategies lined out in chapter six were great, I actually remember doing some of them in high school, especially SQ3R. I also noticed we just did the vocabulary word sort activity in class last week – and it was fun – so there are good ways to engage the kids and not just make them zone out over a textbook. I particularly liked the idea of Guide-O-Rama study guides, they seemed fun. Hooray for strategies! This is what I’ve been waiting two years to learn in college.

As for everybody’s buddy Mahmoud, whew! This guy is a character! I actually skipped my afternoon class to watch this live today but the article sums things up nicely. You can read the article about him here http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Iran-US.html?_r=1&oref=slogin .  I suppose I am jaded, but since the news media has basically become an entertainment medium, I find a lot of humor in the news. The fact that this man stood on the stage at Columbia University and claimed there are no homosexuals in Iran is laughable. Of course there aren’t, because you are executing them all!

On the other hand, I think it says something about our nation that we allow the president of an enemy nation to take the stage at one of our prestigious universities.

The paragraph in the article about how his past comments about Israel have sparked some controversy – but may have been mistranslated – was thought provoking. He was speaking in Farsi today, how do we know what he was even saying? Sure, there was a translator there, but what if she got something wrong? That’s another reason that literacy is so important: we don’t have to rely on others for translation, as they could be telling us incorrect information. 

Well, first of all I have to say using the split-page notetaking strategy was a bit tedious for me – I’m old and set in my ways. That said, I agree with Fisher’s statement that it is very difficult to study from poorly organized notes and most high school kids are pretty unorganized! As a future social studies teacher, a subject that unfortunately requires a lot of notetaking, having my students experiment with different styles would definitely help them figure out the best way they personally can learn.

As for the readings, Pahl and Rowsell make an excellent case for allowing students to bring their outside literacy practices and cultural identities into school with them. But ian’t it is still necessary to teach kids the “proper” reading and writing skills that will  be needed later on in life in college and the workforce? I guess this is why stressing the context of different uses of literacy is so important. The vignettes were very helpful in illustrating concrete ways to allow students to use their multiliteracies together.

The article I chose for this week is “Making a Hard-Life Story Open a Door to College,” which can be read at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/27/education/27college.html?ex=1190174400&en=548072165388e874&ei=5070 . I think it is so exciting that programs like this exist to help low SES students apply for college. I’ll admit that when I was applying for colleges I picked schools with no essay in the application on purpose – I was scared to death of the very idea! As we discussed last week in class, writing an essay in high school took a very different format than anything I’ve written for college. Plus I went to private school for many years, so I can just imagine how someone from a low SES area school would be even more hesitant to apply to colleges requiring essays. I also noticed how they were using a literacy strategy that mirrored what we did the first day of class: freewrite about yourself and then have other people give feedback about what they liked and what they wanted to know more about.

This article can be viewed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/us/politics/10dems.html?_r=1&ref=politics&oref=slogin

I found the concept of having a presidential debate entirely in Spanish (whether spoken or translated) to be extremely positive and interesting. As we learned in the reading this week, globalization leads to an increased need to understand and embrace other cultures. The fact that these candidates are reaching out to the 17 million Spanish-speaking Americans can only be a benefit to one’s campaign. I think it would be reasonable to expand on the book’s definition of multiliteracy to include being literate in a second language in our constantly expanding, multicultural nation.

This article could easily be a catalyst for a great discussion about exactly what is the face of America today. Growing up, children are taught in social studies class to think of the United States as a cultural melting pot; where anyone can come to improve their life. Yet this idea is directly contradicted by the immigration debate that recently occured in Congress. I would ask the students to reflect upon what they see as the reason behind having this debate and if they thought it was important to include all Americans in the political process.

Well, I never thought I would have a blog like this. I wonder if something will actually come up now when I google myself – how exciting!

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